Tyrannized, trapped, targeted, traumatized: surviving a filicidal father

A story from Australia, written by John Woods

My early life was catastrophically traumatizing—and I very nearly didn’t survive to adulthood. As a teenager, I came within a hair’s breadth of being murdered by my father, who died in consequence of what he intended to be a familicide-plus-suicide, or indeed a mass-murder-suicide. This fatal rampage was precipitated directly by a disagreement between him and me. 

However, for me, the principal trauma was not this denouement, this final dramatic event. Rather, it was my preceding childhood, which was characterized by unremitting domestic tyranny and abuse, and—in the years leading up to the final showdown—a crescendoing anticipation of mortal violence.

So, I ought to start at the beginning …

My father was a monster.

He had a singularly extreme paranoid personality disorder, manifested as an all-encompassing misanthropy: a hatred ultimately of all humanity, a hatred that became progressively more murderous.

While he himself divulged essentially nothing of his early life to me or my mother and sisters, we discovered eventually—from third parties—that he had stormed out of his family home as an eighteen year-old, never again to contact his parents or siblings. During a brief career in the military, while living in small-town Victoria, he met the woman who would become my mother. Mom had perhaps the lowest self-esteem of anyone I’ve ever met. She could never really explain why she developed a relationship with my father. From the little she disclosed, the ‘red flags’ were screamingly evident from the outset of their courtship—he was ill-tempered, intolerant, controlling … as well as utterly friendless. Their Adelaide honeymoon—if such a term is applicable—was a disaster. But my mother was somehow already trapped in a loveless marriage.

As far back in my own early childhood as I can remember, my father had created in our little family home in western Sydney an ambience of intolerance, hostility and menace.

His life was hallmarked by the progressive rejection of all human relationships. First to go in our family was the older of my two sisters. She was discarded irrevocably from early adolescence, labelled ‘the animal’ by my father, and forced to eat meals alone in her bedroom.

By the time I started elementary school, my parents no longer functioned as a married couple or even communicated with one another, though they continued to reside in the same house. My father commandeered the major bedroom; Mom had been banished to sleep on the living room sofa.

My second sister was disowned just after her matriculation from high school. With her newly acquired driver’s license and first car, she had shown the temerity to drive my mother to a consultation with a divorce lawyer. My father regarded this act as an unforgivable betrayal—he and my sister never spoke again. And the divorce never happened. Proceedings were soon halted because (as we discovered after his death, from his rabid writings) his paranoid ideation extended to his own lawyer, whom he believed to be part of the conspiracy against him.

In fact, he was asocial within and beyond the household. A bookish man, for most of his adulthood he was employed as a high-school teacher, but throughout this career he regarded his colleagues (and most of his pupils) with derision and suspicion, and he never remained at any school for long. On occasion, he established brief, seemingly friendly relationships with work acquaintances and others, but such people were soon inevitably cast aside consequent to some perceived betrayal.

During my final year of elementary school, the family’s domestic circumstances took some unexpected turns.

Firstly, my father, having rejected his family (other than me, at that stage) and having abandoned his teaching job, moved (alone) a couple of hundred miles away to the national capital, Canberra, where he’d somehow secured employment with Hansard at Federal Parliament House. In his absence, the rest of us were briefly able to live an unprecedentedly normal and relaxed life: invite visitors, own a TV, play pop music on the radio. My mother regained and redecorated the master bedroom. This was the happiest year of my childhood.

However, at the beginning of the October, disaster struck. One morning on my walk to school, I was knocked down by a car while crossing the road. Apparently, the driver—not realizing that he was approaching a marked crosswalk—had impatiently overtaken the car stopped in front of him and accelerated through the crosswalk. Hit at high speed by the vehicle, I was reportedly thrown tens-of-yards down the road, in the process acquiring a fractured skull, humerus and pelvis. Rushed by ambulance to inner Sydney’s famous Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, I was placed in an induced coma in Intensive Care.

In physical terms, I made a remarkably rapid and complete recovery from what were initially considered potentially life-threatening—or at least life-changing—injuries. Discharged home after several weeks and with a further month or more convalescing at home, I was able to return to classes and thereby complete the school year (which in Australia ends during mid-December).

However, the event precipitated not only a return to the previous domestic tyranny, but indeed to further deterioration. My father returned immediately from Canberra, whereupon his abuse of my mother became even more extreme than before. He (preposterously) blamed Mom for my accident, accusing her of neglecting to teach me road-crossing skills, despite the incident having been in no way my own fault. Somehow, he forced Mom to pay for him to stay at a hotel near the hospital during my admission. Throughout my hospitalization, he passively-aggressively prevented Mom from visiting me by remaining at my bedside himself until the 8 PM end of visiting hours (his antipathy towards her precluding them from visiting together). And then, he moved back into the family home.

So, my discharge home from hospital … was to hell-on-earth. 

Thus began my high-school years (seventh through twelfth grade in Australia). Thenceforth, until my father’s death a little over three years later, our little house operated as two separate households: the L-shaped corridor down the middle functioned as an iron curtain. While my Mom and sisters maintained normal relationships with each other and with me, I was the sole family member who hadn’t been disowned irrevocably by my father. I alone straddled both households, though it wouldn’t be correct to describe me as an intermediary or a ‘go-between’ because there essentially was no communication between my father and the others.

My father re-established the rules of the house from previous years—prohibition of any noise audible from his room, and prohibition of visitors indoors. He rigidly enforced these rules when storming in or out of his room—with a glare, with a scowl, with thundering footsteps, or with a slamming door, but with no eye contact. Essentially, the toxic ambience of our home had a somewhat paradoxical nature—coercive control but (in Mom’s and my sisters’ case) in the absence of a relationship.

During this period, my father developed a preoccupation with me playing the game of squash. Although there’s nothing intrinsically unusual or untoward about a father being obsessed with his kids’ sport, in my case it was rather over-the-top. The obsession meant that I was forced to play squash (mostly with him, and also in Saturday morning kids’ competitions) every day. And I mean essentially every day—363 days per year (other than Good Friday and Christmas Day when all the squash centers were shut). His subterfuge to conceal this obsession was using a different squash center every day of the week. Unfortunately, I wasn’t very talented, and my skills developed poorly.

Throughout my father’s final years, my relationship with him was one of absolute, regimented subordination and self-straitjacketing: he rigidly enforced my squash schedule and sleep routine. A couple of times, I inadvertently broke the rules. On one occasion, my sister invited me to her evening walk, towards the end of which I realized in a panic that we wouldn’t arrive home until a couple of minutes after my prescribed bedtime of 9:00 PM. ‘Don’t be silly’, she said, ‘we’ll be home by two minutes past nine at the latest’. Upon reaching the front gate—literally at 9:02—we encountered my Mom, in the front garden, sobbing and trembling. My father had knocked the back door down in his rage at my tardiness. On this occasion and following one other outburst of physical violence, my mother called the police for assistance, but they were unable (or unwilling) to intervene in any meaningful manner.

My relationship with my father did not involve normal conversation. I was compelled to listen to him endlessly, but I was permitted to speak little. Apart from the tedious rambling about squash, the content of his monologue to me was often menacing. He very clearly wanted my mother and sisters dead. With a sinister, sardonic grin, he would say things like, ‘Your mother’s fat. I’ve read that fat people have heart attacks. But she doesn’t smoke ... Now, how can we make her smoke?’, and ‘Your sisters both drive Volkswagen Beetles [which they did] … It’s said that Volkswagens often roll over when they crash!’

In essence, throughout my adolescence I was alone in my state of ‘survival mode’—being the sole direct audience of my father’s paranoia and increasingly murderous ideation, with a burgeoning consciousness that I could not avoid eventually becoming the final betrayer and thereby the last straw.

Indeed, the inevitably fatal outcome was precipitated by me.

How did this endgame come about?

Despite my rather inferior natural talent, by the time I was fifteen, three years of obsessional-by-proxy squash playing had gained me a place in a ‘Junior A1 Grade’ team at the center where, in recent months, my father had taken me to receive weekly professional coaching. Being keen for the team to compete successfully, I invited into the team my squash-playing school classmate G., who was more talented and skilled than I. However, I had inadvertently failed to consult my father in advance of the invitation. Enraged because he despised G., my father promptly withdrew me from the team, leaving me with no basis to participate in the season’s Saturday morning competition with which he himself was so obsessed ...

When I mentioned the situation to the other members of my fractured family, my sister H. encouraged me to re-join the team surreptitiously, that is, without telling my father.

At this time, H. was in most regards a precociously insightful 21-year-old. She was not, however, quite so cognizant as I was of how murderously vindictive my father’s state of mind had become, and what the consequences of such an act would likely be.

Fatefully, I followed her advice: I phoned the team manager and rejoined the team. Now, I have neither the expertise nor the objectivity to self-analyze lengthily about my decision-making in this instance. However, for what it’s worth, I consider that my momentous decision was a result of neither principled courage nor of petulant rebelliousness. In every other aspect of my adolescent life, I had certainly been neither courageous nor rebellious—much to the contrary, I could have been (and presumably was) considered a rather wimpy goody two-shoes.

Several days later, on the first Saturday of the competition, my father discovered what I had done and was incandescent with rage. Afterwards, in the lead-up to his rampage and death the following Saturday morning, he avoided me, spending little time at home.

Throughout that final week, however, the fear and foreboding in the house was palpable. Fecklessly, I kept a kitchen knife under my pillow, fantasizing that I might be able to defend myself if he attacked me in bed. In fact, the only contact he made with me in my bedroom that week was to tell me: ‘Sonny Boy, if you persist in this, you won’t have a father and I won’t have a son’. The murder-suicide intention was unequivocal … but what could I do?

On the final Saturday, H. again drove me, with my father following in his own car, to the ‘home game’ at the courts where he would die later that morning. Realizing I wasn’t fit to play, I reserved myself to the bench. As the A1 Grade Team match progressed that morning, my father paced to and fro along the gallery, in silence but plethoric with murderous rage. Eventually, he accosted my sister, literally salivating with rabid hatred. By this stage, I assumed that my own life was finished; the outcome was a fait accompli. The first and only time in my life, I shouted at my father, telling him to f*** off. He returned to his silent pacing. The manager politely asked him to leave the premises. He did. My team coach scolded me for using expletive language ‘in front of the ladies’.

Forty-five minutes later he was dead. So, very nearly, were all of us. He drove home (a distance of around three miles) and waited in his car in the driveway—evidently with a loaded .22 rifle—for Mom to return from her habitual Saturday shopping. Anticipating the worst, my mother didn’t return home following her walk from the shops but instead stopped at the next-door neighbor’s house, from which vantage point she could secretly watch my father sitting in his car in the driveway. Presumably losing patience when my Mom didn’t appear, he then drove to the squash center manager’s family home and fired several shots at them through their front screen door but fortunately hit no-one, narrowly missing the manager’s wife with babe-in-arms, who’d slammed the wooden door shut when her teenaged squash-champion son, reading a book on the front verandah, had seen Mr Woods coming and raced inside: ‘I think he’s got an axe’.

My father didn’t hang around to finish off the family but hurriedly drove off. His main game was the squash center itself, less than a mile away. With astonishing courage, presence-of-mind, and anticipation, the manager, at home with his terrified family, called the police not to his own house but to the squash center, then also phoned the center’s receptionist in warning.

A few minutes later, my father drove his car into the internal parking area immediately underneath the center’s upstairs reception area and recreation room, which at that moment were crowded with perhaps 50 to 70 people: mostly kids, along with their parents and coaches.

The receptionist, forewarned by phone, raced to the bottom of the staircase to lock the front door. Moments later, my father, frustrated at being locked out of the building, fired shots up the staircase, missing the receptionist but with one bullet grazing a kid on the elbow. He returned to his car, lit a match to ignite a fuse connecting half-a-dozen or more jerrycans full of petrol with each other and with the vehicle’s fuel tank. He then shot himself through the head, presumably dying instantly.

Simultaneously, a police car raced into the parking area. The two police officers, together with two tradesmen working in an adjacent workshop who’d heard the commotion of gunshots and had fetched a fire extinguisher, miraculously managed to quench the blaze, preventing the improvised explosive device from destroying much of the building. The senior police officer later told the coroner that some of the plastic jerrycans were beginning to melt with the heat. There had been seconds to spare … All four men subsequently received bravery awards from the state government.

Meanwhile, inside, the morning competition now finished, I had been mindlessly playing an informal squash game with a younger kid. I was expecting to die that morning, but I just couldn’t predict exactly how or when. Realistically, there was nowhere to run and hide. My teammate G. knocked on the court door, ashen-faced with terror. ‘John, your father’s outside; he’s got a gun!’ More out of resignation than bravery, I calmly left the court and began to mount the staircase to the gallery, anticipating my execution. Much to my surprise, I was greeted from the top not by the monster, but by A. the receptionist, who tearily broke the news: ‘It’s OK, John. He’s dead’.

In short, it was all over. My sister identified the partly incinerated corpse, and after providing police statements we went home … and lived happily ever after.

Well, not quite.

Although I no longer needed to exist literally in ‘survival mode’, my subsequent life has been a struggle with anxiety and avoidance.

The Monday following the fatal rampage, when I blithely turned up at my school, none of the teachers seemed aware of what had transpired. My friends had had no prior inkling of my situation, and whatever was whispered among my classmates was not communicated to me.

Crucially, inadequate mental health support was offered me at that time. Counselling provided by the school was perfunctory and very short-lived. To my knowledge, my Mom and sisters were never offered any mental health support. I struggled through the remainder of my school years, ultimately crashing out of the last two months of twelfth grade with a mental health breakdown.

Since my father's ostentatious demise, my self-doubts have been perpetuated by the shame of cascading failures in attaining rites of passage, life skills and personal goals. 

Perhaps rather imprudently, following high school I chose to study medicine (which at the time in Australia was typically delivered as a double-length undergraduate degree) and spent several years working as a doctor. However, my performance was chronically impaired by anxiety problems. I dropped out of specialist internist training (which is grueling for anyone!) on mental health grounds, eventually abandoning the medical profession permanently, and have spent much of my adult life unemployed.

While I have established a small number of wonderful friendships, I’ve remained single throughout my life. Fecklessly, I have attempted to escape the past by moving between various Australian state/territory jurisdictions, ultimately settling in Perth, Western Australia (the end of the country farthest from where I spent my childhood).

Enduring a single act of overt ultraviolence has constituted merely the 'iceberg-tip' in my filicide survivor's experiential journey, which has culminated in lifelong vulnerability to further (including occupational) trauma—along with healing opportunities. A life constrained by complex post-traumatic stress, anxiety/depression, and avoidant personality traits has been compensated by glimmers of redemption.